Nico's blog on all things VMware Cloud on AWS

In VMware Cloud on AWS, we have two logical domains – one for “Management Resources” (where the ESXi hosts, vCenter, NSX Manager and NSX Controllers are deployed) and one for “Compute Resources”, where data VMs are deployed.

A common use case for VMware Cloud on AWS is to leverage for Disaster Recovery. Many of my customers either don’t have a Disaster Recovery strategy or simply struggle to justify running a ‘ghost’ DC, just in case a disaster were to happen. The way Disaster Recovery is offered today within VMware Cloud on AWS is through an add-on (VMware Site Recovery) that leverages vSphere Replication and vSphere Recovery Manager.

Probably the most popular use case for VMware Cloud on AWS today: using it to lift and shift all applications running on a DC and moving them, untouched, to VMware Cloud on AWS. AWS would refer to this migration strategy as ‘re-hosting.’ Why would customers do this? It enables them to accelerate their move to the Cloud with no disruption to their applications and to their operating model while leveraging their existing VMware expertise.

As I am based in the UK, I often work with customers based in central London who face a common issue: real estate is expensive. Many of our customers are dealing with space, power or cooling constraints which means they cannot increase the size of their IT infrastructure because of expensive square footage. VMware Cloud on AWS gives them the ability to burst to the Cloud on a temporary basis (giving them time to address the capacity constraints) or permanent basis (making VMC a permanent extension to their D.C.).

A number of our customers want to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS to expand into a new market. As the VMC SDDC can be deployed in a matter of hours, it allows customers to enter a new market without having to commit CAPEX. A side benefit of using VMC for this use case is that, if the market expansion were to fail, customers can exit the market as fast as they entered it (they are not left with racks of hardware).

Many of our customers are using ​VMware Cloud on AWS as an infrastructure Island. VMC can be used temporarily for projects, development sprint, testing purposes and avoid the need to invest in long-term CAPEX. Once the project is completed, workloads can be migrated back on-prem or simply discarded.

As customers migrate or create virtual machines in VMware Cloud on AWS, they might want to leverage to run services accessible from the Internet, such as web services. We make it very easy to do this in three steps: